Total Control Massive Failure

Albert Hunt (0:09)

Hello and welcome to Politics War Room with James Carville and I'm Al Hunt. This week, our guest is the president of the Brennan Center for Justice, Michael Waldman, the national treasure. Remember, we love taking your questions, so write to politicswarroom.gmail.com for next week's show. We'll get to as many as we can, but don't forget to tell us where you're from. You can also get text updates about what's next for Politicon and Politics War Room by signing up at politicon.com. So tell your friends about us and remind them to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Please check out the links to our sponsors, Smalls, Mint Mobile, Hers WL., and Superpower in our episode, Show Notes. And we thank you for supporting these sponsors. It helps make this podcast happen.

Hey James, let's take a look at what the Republicans out there are talking about in key races. In South Carolina, Darlene Graham says the issue is her opponent, Annie Andrews, is pushing gender-affirming care. In Texas, Ken Paxton, among other slurs, says James Telerico wants trans to play in women's sports. In Kansas, Roger Marshall, remember the former doctor who sued low-income patients for bills due, charging 18% interest rate. He accuses his opponent, Adam Hamilton, of covering up a pedophile ring at a church youth care. JD. Vance, who's trying to please his boss with the most smears, raises them all. Two points I want to make. Number one, every single one of these is a lie, a lie. Dr. Annie Andrews, a pediatrician, has supported evidence-based medical care for trans with parental concurrence, parental consent, and no surgery. The Marshall charge against Hamilton, who runs a mega church and may well be the first Democrat elected to the Senate from Kansas since 1932, is just simply untrue. And Marshall just desperately wants to avoid attention to his own scandals. As if Ken Paxson, you really expect it with Ken Paxson, twice indicted, once impeached, attorney general, who recently was celebrating over in Dubai with a woman, we're not sure who she was, and some fugitives. That's what Ken Paxson is all about. And his lies are transparent, too. Charlie Baker, head of the NCAA, says there are fewer than 10 trans playing in women's sports out of more than 500,000 NCAA athletes. But this is what those candidates want to talk about. What they're not talking about, affordability, the price of gas, groceries, health care, a disastrous war in Iran, and massive corruption in Washington. This really is distasteful. And James, I don't think it's going to work.

Well, first of all, I agree 100% with everything you said. But I think the closing message has to really be distilled, because with this cloud, there's so many places that you can go, and there's so many lines of attack that are just outrageous and on their own merit attention by every voter. But you got to close, and what I'd close is states like Ohio and Iowa and Texas and Kansas and Arkansas and Mississippi, you've had unified, Florida for sure, unified Republican control of state government, of the federal government, of the judiciary. It's not working. You've got $2 trillion in debt this year alone. For what? Inflations ran at 3.7% in September, $2 trillion. And you want to tell me you're creating 50,000 jobs a month? You don't make 50,000 a month, you don't make even a million jobs, you just give people away. This has been a massive failure of one party to govern. And people understand that, and they need to be reminded of that at every juncture.

It's not that there are 10 trans athletes out of 500,000, it's there's disaster. We lost the war, forgot to, we even forgot to mention for $2 trillion we can't win a goddamn war. It's a massive failure that Republican governance has brought to the United States.

It absolutely is. And it gets worse, you know, just watching the Dear Leader this week, you can add, you can add, you know, a little bit of trimming to your message, which I think is the right one. Trump sold out Ukraine because he just can't get over his love affair with Putin. Why? What's he getting out of it? What has he gotten out of it? Saudi Arabia, which where the Trumps, Trump and his family have found a gold mine. They support them. They want help in their war against the hoodies. James, Saudi Arabia has the eighth largest defense budget in the world, larger than France, larger than Israel, larger than Japan. Not one ounce of American blood or any of our weapons, already shortfalls, should be provided there so the Trumps can make more money. And the highlight, this is my favorite Trump of the week, the highlight was campaigning for Ohio Senator John Houston. He talked about how great Houston's ass was. I'm not making that up. I can see why he had to talk about Houston's ass. There wasn't anything else to talk about in Ohio.